Facebook embraces remote working beyond COVID-19, but may cut pay

By Kurt Wagner

May 22, 2020 — 9.06am

Facebook plans to hire more remote workers in areas where the company doesn't have an office, and let some current employees work from home permanently if they'd like to.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company plans to "aggressively open up remote hiring" starting immediately with the US, particularly for engineering talent. Based on internal employee surveys, he believes remote workers could make up as much as 50 per cent of Facebook's workforce in the next five to 10 years.

"We and a lot of other folks were very worried that productivity was going to really fall off a cliff," Zuckerberg said in an interview. "It just hasn't. We are at least as productive as we were before, and some people report being even more productive."

The social network, which closed its Menlo Park, California, offices in early March due to the coronavirus outbreak, has already told employees that they can work from home through the end of the year. Zuckerberg shared the remote hiring plans with workers on Thursday. Facebook had more than 48,000 global staff at the end of March.

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"The vast majority of people at the company are working remotely anyway, so constraining ourselves to only hiring people who live near an office that's not open anyways isn't really that efficient," he added.

Facebook is the latest, and largest, tech company to announce a full or partial move to more permanent remote work amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Twitter and Square, both run by CEO Jack Dorsey, have announced that their employees can work from home permanently if they'd like. Canadian e-commerce company Shopify said this week it will allow its 5000 staff to work from home indefinitely.

It's a trend that could drastically change Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area, which has for decades been the mecca for high-paying technology jobs. Many of the world's most valuable companies, including Facebook, Apple and Google are headquartered just south of San Francisco, which has made the surrounding area one of the wealthiest and most expensive in the world.

Facebook employees who wish to work remotely, and are approved to do so, will be paid based on their new location, Zuckerberg added. That means employees who move to areas with a lower cost of living than the Bay Area would likely take a pay cut.

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"We'll localize everybody's comp on January 1," he said. "They can do whatever they want through the rest of the year, but by the end of the year they should either come back to the Bay Area or they need to tell us where they are."

Zuckerberg said his decisions aren't driven by employee demand, but there are a number of other benefits to remote hiring. This will extend the "talent pool" of people Facebook can hire, he said, and could help Facebook increase the diversity of its workforce, both racially and ethnically, but also ideologically.

There is also a potential environmental benefit, Zuckerberg said, pointing out that pollution and emissions have dipped as people have stopped traveling. "I'd rather have our employees teleporting to work with VR or video chat than sitting in a commute and kind of poisoning the atmosphere," he said.

There could be product advantages, too. Facebook's mission is to create products that help people feel closer even when they are physically apart, Zuckerberg said. This would give the company a chance to put its own products to the test and "eat our own dog food," he added.

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There are still some unknowns. Zuckerberg believes a change like this could impact some of what he calls "the softer stuff," like social connections, group brainstorming and creativity. Companies like Facebook and Google have changed work culture by offering employees never-ending perks, like free food, shuttles to work and even laundry. Those elements of work cultures will undoubtedly be affected.

"We don't know yet how much we are drafting off of culture, relationships, strategy and direction that have been developed up until this point. We're kind of just gliding forward," he said. "We don't know how hard it's going to be to evolve."